Perceived Stress and Religious Coping in Morbidly Obese People

OBJECTIVE: To assess religious/spiritual coping in morbidly obese people and to correlate its relation to Perceived Stress.

METHOD: Cross-sectional, non-experimental, quantitative study, with collection carried out between September 2020 and July 2021. The analyzes were based on absolute and relative frequency, central tendency, Shapiro-Wilk normality test and Spearman correlation coefficient.

RESULTS: We obtained 41 participants, 29.27% men and 70.73% women. Utilization scores were high for Religious and Spiritual Coping Scale (SRCOPE), Total SRCOPE (TSRCOPE) (M = 3.6, SD = 0.4), medium for Positive SRCOPE (PSRCOPE) (M = 3.1, SD = 0.7) and low use of Negative SRCOPE (NSRCOPE) (M = 1.9, SD = 0.6). The correlation between the 14 questions of the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) and the SRCOPE showed a positive association between TSRCOPE, PSRCOPE (p = 0.031 and r = 0.337) and NSRCOPE (p = 0.002 and r = 0.477), indicating that morbidly obese people believe in positive or negative influence of spirituality and religiosity in their lives. The correlations between factors PSRCOPE 1, 2 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 with the PSS items showed significant associations in practically all questions, especially in PSRCOPE 1, suggesting that participants use their religiosity and spirituality in coping everyday life.

CONCLUSION: Stress, whether chronic or acute, plays an important role in the maintenance of morbid obesity and the strategy of spiritual religious coping can be appropriate and beneficial to the population in question. Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies with a more robust sample are needed in order to obtain generalized data for the entire Brazilian population.